We must hope Dr. Soon is right …

And the global warming apocalypse is not nigh. Real-world evidence certainly supports him.

Jeffrey Foss, PhD

Everyone has heard the bad news. Imminent Climate Apocalypse (aka “global warming” and “climate change”) threatens humanity and planet with devastation, unless we abandon the use of fossil fuels.

Far fewer people have heard the good news. The sun has just entered its Grand Minimum phase, and the Earth will gradually cool over the next few decades.

Why should we all hope Earth will cool? Because nobody with any trace of human decency would hope the Earth will actually suffer catastrophic warming.

Many of us believe in the threat of global warming, but live in the hope that we can switch to “renewable energy” before it is too late. But this is a false hope. Despite our best efforts over several decades, renewables such as wind and solar energy still meet only 2% of global energy needs, while hydro adds only 7% or so.

So avoiding the alleged Climate/Global Warming Apocalypse by relying on renewable energy would require surviving on less than 10% of our current energy requirements. But that is impossible. It would also be really catastrophic: billions could die.

Our global economy runs on energy, and over 80% of it is still fossil fuels, with nuclear and other non-renewables providing another 10%. If we switch to renewables tomorrow, 90% of our energy will be lost, and the global economy will sink like the Titanic. Keeping nuclear power would merely add a second lifeboat as the great ship sinks. Even if the energy loss were spread out over decades, the final result would still be the same.

Humankind could not produce enough food, clothing and shelter. Jobs would vanish. Massive starvation, disease and death would result. Hard physical labor would once again become the norm. Even though life could be maintained for some portion of humanity, liberty and happiness would be lost.

Let’s stop pretending. The prescribed cure for Climate Apocalypse is far worse than the purported disease. If we don’t use coal, oil and natural gas for energy, many of the 7 billion of us now alive must die. Those who survive will be impoverished and enslaved, toiling and scavenging for food by day, and fearing the darkness by night – except for the privileged few who still have money, energy and power.

The sudden and dramatic growth of human life, liberty, and happiness since the industrial revolution was achieved by replacing muscle power with coal and oil power. Before that, Hillsdale College professor of history Burt Folsom points out, only the wealthy could afford whale oil and candles. Everyone else had to go to bed early, and often hungry, when the sun went down, sleeping to recover enough energy to work – only to repeat the daily cycle yet again. Freedom of thought and travel had little real worth when we were too tired to think or walk.

The petroleum age saved whales from the brink of extinction – and brought cheap kerosene to the masses, so that they could read at night, bringing light into their lives and their brains.

The premature switch to renewable energy recommended by the false prophets of Climate Apocalypse is really just one step in an industrial counter-revolution devoutly desired by those discontented with modern life in free market democracies – and ready to erase our hard-won prosperity and freedom.

The Climate Apocalypse global warming bad news is rewarded by big money from the government and servile amplification from traditional big news media – while the good news of global cooling is silenced and unheard, stifled by both traditional media and most of today’s social media platforms.

We should all be suspicious of the motives of those who push this bad news, and welcome those who push back. Dr. Willie Soon is one scientist, although by no means the only one, who has the courage to stand up to big money, big government, big (pseudo) science, big media and big environmentalism to spread the good news. It’s high time we all heard it.

The good news from Dr. Soon and his fellow solar scientists is that the increase in global temperatures since 1800 was caused by two centuries of increasing solar output – not by human use of coal and oil.

But then solar output began to fall around 2000, in a repetition of a well-known 200-year cycle of solar activity, and global warming stopped. That’s more good news that too few people know. The purveyors of Climate Apocalypse have no explanation for this two-decade failure of their prophecy, which fortunately for all of humanity shows the superiority of solar science over apocalyptic warming foretold by computer models, hysteria and headlines – but not by real-world evidence.

Finally, solar science says we should expect steady but manageable global cooling until about mid-century, when solar activity will recover and temperatures begin to warm once again. Once again, this will be due to solar activity, and not to fossil fuels or carbon dioxide emissions.

In the best news of all, that means humanity’s successful pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, and better living standards and healthcare needn’t be stopped by Climate Apocalypse – or its prescribed cure. The only thing we have to fear is the fear of Climate Apocalypse itself.

Equally important, a warmer or cooler planet with more atmospheric CO2 and plentiful, reliable, affordable fossil fuel and nuclear energy would be infinitely preferable to a cooler planet with less CO2 and only expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind, solar and biofuel energy.

At the very least, humankind has an historic opportunity to witness a crucial test between two scientific hypotheses of enormous consequence. The next decade or two will reveal whether Earth warms or cools.

Surely all right-minded people must hope that it cools – and that the fear-mongering of imminent global warming apocalypse cools as well.

I might add that no one should wish the current severe Chicago-style polar vortex cold on anyone. I extend my sympathies and prayers to all who are now suffering from the cold. But be of good cheer in the knowledge that this cold-snap at least puts the lie to vastly worse climate scare global warming stories.

I also wouldn’t wish on anyone the “Green New Deal” energy reality of February 1, 2019 – when wind power provided 1.5% of the energy that kept lights on and homes warm in America’s Mid-Atlantic region, solar provided zero, and derided and despised coal, natural gas and nuclear power provided a whopping 93% or that energy! Imagine the cold, misery and death toll under 100% pseudo-renewable energy.

Dr. Jeffrey Foss is a philosopher of science, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and author of Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature.

Thanks Javier. So according to your graph solar peaked in 1950 and had been dropping ever since. That would seem to be an ANTI-correlation with global temps. You are really seeing what you want to see even if the data you present shows the exact opposite.

Frankly, suggesting ‘it’s the sun stupid’ is no more credible than the CO2 control knob. Climate is complex, any such attempts at reducing it to linear relationship to a single variable are naive, self-delusional and unscientific.

The best your graph does is shows the early 20th c. warming may have been solar and lack of cooling since 1950 can be supportive of AGW GHG warming. Well done.

So according to your graph solar peaked in 1950 and had been dropping ever since.

No Greg. You are just letting your assumptions take control. Solar activity was above average between 1935 and 2004. Above average solar activity causes warming. Period.

Solar activity went below average in 2005, and that’s when warming stopped. Since then we have had no warming. Just an oversized El Niño. No further warming will take place until solar activity goes again above average.

Solar maximum is years past, yet the sun has been remarkably active lately. Is the sunspot cycle broken?

Imagine you’re in California. It’s July, the middle of summer. The sun rises early; bright rays warm the ground. It’s a great day to be outside. Then, suddenly, it begins to snow–not just a little flurry, but a swirling blizzard that doesn’t stop for two weeks.

That’s what forecasters call unseasonal weather.

It sounds incredible, but “something like that just happened on the sun,” says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Only a few weeks ago solar activity was low. The face of the sun was nearly blank–“very few sunspots,” says Hathaway–and space weather near Earth was mild. “Mild is just what we expect at this point in the 11-year solar cycle,” he explains. “The most recent maximum was in 2001, and solar activity has been declining ever since.”
Astrophotographer Bob Sandy of Virginia took this picture of giant sunspot 486 emerging over the sun’s limb on Oct. 23, 2003. It is preceded by another giant spot, numbered 484.

Then, suddenly, in late October the sun began to behave strangely. Three giant sunspots appeared, each one larger than the planet Jupiter. In California where smoke from wildfires dimmed the sun enough to look straight at it, casual sky watchers were startled by the huge blotches on the sun. One of them, named “sunspot 486,” was the biggest in 13 years

Early 20th c. warming did not START is 1935. You fall at the first assumption.

Again you fail in your assumptions. I did not say warming started in 1935. I did not say solar activity is the ONLY factor affecting temperature, just the main. Other things cause warming and cooling, like CO2, internal variability, volcanoes…

If you require that solar activity explains every temperature wiggle to accept it you are falling into a well known fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. The solar hypothesis just needs to provide evidence that it affects temperature, not that it controls temperature at all times. And the correlation between temperature and solar activity for the past 300 years is the best there is. No other factor fits temperature so well.

Not really. At least three factors contributed to the 1950-1975 hiatus. SC20 had less activity, the known ~ 60-year oceanic oscillation, and a change in ENSO frequency with more frequent Niñas. As I said the Sun is not the only factor affecting temperature.

Solar activity was above average between 1935 and 2004. Above average solar activity causes warming. Period.

“Period” usually means “that is it” nothing else, no more arguments. Period does not mean:
… except for the 1945-1975 hiatus
… except for the volcanoes
… except for the extra La Ninas
… except for the when it doesn’t ….

Your arguments and logic are laughable. But IIRC you are a climatologist, so I try to be understanding. 😉

“the recent anthropogenic contribution is found to be less than the contribution of solar activity. Reflect- ing the predominance of internal variability in the error output, the natural contribution (solar and volcanic activities, plus internal variability) becomes clearly much greater than the anthropogenic contribution in the recent warming.
…
The first three reconstructions lead to reject the IPCC hypothesis of a low sensitivity to solar activity.”

If we let the data speak by itself it says solar. Of course you are free to ignore it, but then you won’t understand what makes climate change.

The first three reconstructions lead to reject the IPCC hypothesis of a low sensitivity to solar activity.
The variation of TSI presented (d) is not correct [based on the old Hoyt&Schatten group sunspot number assuming a background varying with the cycle average group number (falsified by the space age data)

So you will undoubtedly know what “correlation” means in science and it does not mean eyeballing a spaghetti graph with one eye closed and declaring a correlation. It means calculating a correlation coefficient and stating what value of CC would be significant against an assumed null such as normally distributed independent random data with the same degrees of freedom. Bearing in mind that if you are doing junk like running means you are degrading the correlation and its significance , not improving it.

So far I don’t see you provide anything but spaghetti and assertions.

I do agree that there has been a general rise in both global temps and SSN since LIA, though nothing more closely correlated than a general rise which is far from being evidence of causation. If you reduce the whole dataset to once scalar ( the slope of a linear trend ) then everything correlates with everything else and it is meaningless.

Javier – I am convinced that you are on the right track, and that Leif and others are expecting ridiculous correlations. If someone wants to present a sensible argument with convincing evidence against what Javier is saying, I’m ready to be convinced. Leif and others have so far got nowhere near. IMHO.

I can’t take responsibility for what you see or fail to see. I have analyzed the climate of the Holocene, and the solar signature is present in multiple instances of climate change, as is recognized by scores of paleoclimatologists, in all type of proxies related to different climate variables. You are free to ignore all that science and then say that you don’t see anything.

I am not here to convince you of anything, nor to provide for your climate education. The climate science literature is there for something. No point in reproducing what others do with better means.

Agree w/Greg and Dr S. The TSI variance (or lack of it) is the bottom line, and its variance is too small (1.5 w/m2) to have any significant climate effect. Changes in cloud cover/albedo/ocean currents swamp this small of a change. Magnetic effects, UV increases/decreases, etc, etc, have no evidential support, just supposition and guesswork.

“Period” usually means “that is it” nothing else, no more arguments. Period does not mean:
… except for the 1945-1975 hiatus
… except for the volcanoes
… except for the extra La Ninas
… except for the when it doesn’t ….

Greg, what has been mainly lacking of late is top end solar frequencies, that is how the system works as we, Javier included, know it. Much of the effect is lagged for about 3yrs at least, because those frequencies penetrate a few hundred metres of ocean. Though it can still be noticed and was in a few months.
We watched and sure enough the Ninos began to fail after c.2yrs, as a third one is now. Say what you will, we have no egg on our faces yet, but rather proven predictions of ‘wild jetstreams to come as now and last year. We remain watchful because that is how scientists work and no one knows it all to say the least……… Brett

Here is what the SILSO people say:
“The new Sunspot Number series definitely exclude a progressive rise in average solar activity between the Maunder Minimum and an exceptional Grand Maximum in the late 20th century”http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018EGUGA..2019274L

The late 20th c. certainly does now qualify as exceptional in that graph, but does seem consistent with a general warming since LIA and a similarly warm MWP. That would suggest a centennial scale damping due to OHC, Decadal variation does not seem reflected in global temps.

The late 20th c. certainly does NOT qualify as exceptional in that graph, but does seem consistent with a general warming since LIA and a similarly warm MWP. That would suggest a centennial scale damping due to OHC, Decadal variation does not seem reflected in global temps.

“The new Sunspot Number series definitely exclude a progressive rise in average solar activity between the Maunder Minimum and an exceptional Grand Maximum in the late 20th century”

Why, they don’t know how to run a linear least-squares fit to their own data?

Anybody can download their data and see that they are lying.
Excel displays the trend at y = 0.0844x – 77.954
Starting at 65.5 sunspots in 1700 and ending at 92.4 sunspots in 2018.
Looks to me that the trend is clearly positive, but perhaps the people at SILSO are mathematically challenged.

Obviously you have your own data that is well-behaved and does what you want it to do, but official data says solar activity has been increasing.

And scientists have been known to lie before.
A harsh and undeserved judgement, but well in line with your extreme activism.
The ‘lesser’ miracle is that you are being economical with the truth for the sake of supporting your unjustified views..

If their data is uncertain then they should say that “uncertainty in the data does not preclude a progressive rise in average solar activity between the Maunder Minimum and an exceptional Grand Maximum in the late 20th century”. and not the opposite. By taking a position that is not supported by the data they are showing that the activists are they.

If their data is uncertain then they should say …
The old series indicated a rise larger than the uncertainty. And what they are saying is that you cannot take the new series as evidence for a rise. I.e. you cannot rule out the null-hypothesis that there is no rise.

From Muschelers latest [2016]
Solar Phys (2016) 291:3025–3043
The Revised Sunspot Record in Comparison to Cosmogenic Radionuclide-Based Solar Activity Reconstructions
Raimund Muscheler et al.:
“Independent of these uncertainties, we show a very good agreement between the revised sunspot records and the 10Be records from Antarctica and, in particular, the 14C-based solar-activity reconstructions.”

Leif
It looks to me that the 70-year and 22-year mean use different centering for the running average. That is, the peaks between the two curves appear to be shifted by about 40 or 50 years. Can you confirm that they were both handled the same way?

Can you confirm that they were both handled the same way?
I normally wouldn’t handle them in this way, but the graphs were made in response to some claims by Javier where he tried to cheat by showing running means that ENDED as the years plotted and extended 70-yrs back in time while omitting the 1700-1748 data in order to create an artificial trend. So my graphs were made to appeal to people at his level. So, to be clear: the data point at year 1950 [say] is the mean of the data for the 70-yr interval 1881-1950, and so on.

Lief, your R^2 simply means that the linear trend does not explain a significant amount of the detailed variability in the data, it does not mean it has not risen in a way that could be significant to global climate.

the linear trend does not explain a significant amount of the detailed variability in the data
Yeah, it was intended to show that the linear fit in itself does not indicate any significant trend in observed solar activity.

Back to your manipulated unofficial GN data.
Both the sunspot number [SN] and the validated [e.g. Muscheler] Group number [GN] are used on that graph. The green curve is the average [SN and GN suitably scaled to match] and the R^2 is for that.
The volume it speaks is the lack of trend [as SILSO concurs with].
The lack of trend is also shown by several other solar indices, studyhttps://leif.org/research/Nine-Millennia-of-Multimessenger-Solar-Activity.pdf
to learn.

You mean that solar activity reconstruction that Wu et al., 2018 made and published and that you downloaded, changed the last centuries to suit your prejudices and biases and then presented at WUWT as if it was yours?

Javier February 2, 2019 at 3:11 pmYou mean that solar activity reconstruction that Wu et al., 2018 made and published and that you downloaded, changed the last centuries to suit your prejudices and biases and then presented at WUWT as if it was yours?
You didn’t learn much.
If you had taken the trouble to study my links carefully you would have learned that:
“WEA converted the reconstructed modulation potential to a more practical and certainly more widely used index: the sunspot number, its current version designated SN (version 2, Clette et al. 2014). The conversion was done via the open solar magnetic flux following an ‘established’ procedure (e.g. Usoskin et al. 2003, 2007). As the ‘procedure’ was developed for version 1 of the sunspot number, the newer version 2 data were scaled down by a factor of 0.6 for the calibration, in spite of the so-called k-factor (the 0.6) not being constant over time (Clette & Lefèvre 2016). It seems a step backwards to cling to the obsolete version 1 of the sunspot number scale, so we undo the spurious down-scaling of version 2. We shall not here quibble about details of the conversion procedure except to note that one would expect (even require/b>) that the SN-reconstruction should match the actual observed SN series for the time of overlap. WEA suggest that their reconstructed values be multiplied by 1.667 to place them on the SN V2-scale. Figure 1 shows that this is not enough. A factor of 2.0 seems to be necessary to match the two scales, likely meaning that the WEA calibration is too low by about 20%”
So, my adjustment is needed for their curve to be put on the v2 scale.

“the linear trend does not explain a significant amount of the detailed variability in the data”

Yeah, it was intended to show that the linear fit in itself does not indicate any significant trend in observed solar activity.

You are playing word games as usual and ignoring the point. Significance of the long term trend is relation to the amplitude of the circa 11y “cycle” is what R^2 tells you. It does not tell you whether the long term trend is significant to climate or global temperatures.

You are deliberately confounding the two in an attempt to “prove” that the longer term trend cannot significantly affect climate.

You are playing word games as usual and ignoring the point. Significance of the long term trend is relation to the amplitude of the circa 11y “cycle” is what R^2 tells you.
Nonsense. To see that imagine there were are very large real trend, much larger than the amplitude of the 11-yr cycle, then the observed trend would be very significant. It does not tell you whether the long term trend is significant to climate or global temperatures.
That is irrelevant, it does tell me that there was a very large trend in solar activity which is the sole issue here.

You are deliberately confounding the two in an attempt to “prove” that the longer term trend cannot significantly affect climate.
You are making unfounded and demeaning assumptions here. All I show is that solar activity does not have a trend. If you believe that in spite of that, that solar activity nevertheless significantly affects the climate then it is up to you to justify that belief, e.g. by postulating an unknown and very large ‘amplification’ factor. If you want to do that, that is fine with me as you are free to believe whatever nonsense you wish, but does not change the fact that solar activity does not have a trend [which is the only point I’m making here].

I hope so. Like I said, you took a published peer-reviewed work, altered the last 300 years of data to suit your prejudices and biases, changing one of the main conclusions of the published peer-reviewed work, and sent it to non-peer reviewed storage. Then you posted it at WUWT like you had anything to do with the 9600-yr solar activity reconstruction. You received praise for adulterating a scientific work, instead of scorn.

You can boast about what you did as much as you want. Its scientific relevance is zero. And impressing WUWT readers perhaps means a lot to you. If that is so, please continue, but don’t try to lecture me, because I already know you and your profoundly biased views. You are in a personal crusade against solar effects on climate, perhaps because it reduces your scientific standing has you uphold the opposite view. And particularly since you used to believe in it in your early years before changing your view. If in the end solar variability affects the climate a lot (as evidence supports) you would have changed from the right side to the wrong one. I guess that pisses you off. Your personal crusade against anything solar here at WUWT, demonstrated by being the first to post (or among the first) in every solar article, makes no sense otherwise.

altered the last 300 years of data to suit your prejudices and biases
Well, I showed that their paper did not reproduce the observed sunspot number and showed how to reconcile their result [which I actually like very much] with the actual data. Their mistake is easy to correct. Multiply by 2.000 instead of by 1.667. This brings the reconstruction into line with all our normal solar indices. One thing one must demand is that if a reconstruction purports to match the data, then it must actually do so. As simple as that.
The rest of your comment is not worthy of a reply.

My enduring disappointment is that in order to disprove the concept of CAGW we (sceptics) must all hope for precisely for what we don’t want, a cooler planet.

But look at it another way. Perhaps we should be welcoming a warmer planet. One which ‘bursts’ through the contrived 1.5C temperature limit the IPCC and media have been so desperate to sell us, and watch as people realise nothing catastrophically bad is happening.

The problem with that is, of course, the alarmists and the media will continue to cite every meteorological event as a harbinger of doom, sometime 12 years hence, and in 12 years will cite similar events as catastrophic, 12 years hence…..so on, and so on……….

So I guess we’re back to the original solution, which is to have vulnerable people freeze to death as the planet grows colder and more outrageous cases are made for renewable energy.

Were sceptics an organised, militant bunch we, might plan for both events and formulate a response to both. Unfortunately, that’s not in our nature.

Scot: A warmer world is a healthier, happier, and more prosperous world. Nonetheless, we have an appointment with a stadial some time in the next few thousand years. Then we will know what a climate problem really looks like.

Fortunately, for us, no one now alive will see it. But, historians will laugh at the warmunists just like we laugh at the superstitions of barbarous ages past.

Personally I am hoping to disprove the C in CAGW. Hence I am hoping for more warming.

If this happens we will have to suffer a few years of the alarmists saying “see we said CO2 causes warming” but soon it will become apparent that the warming is beneficial, the way the last 100 years has been.

I am inclining to the theory that CO2 causes little or no warming, but as long as I get a better (warmer) climate I don’t care what the cause is.

I too was disappointed to see this malarkey tossed in to his essay.
And like Hot Scot, I am thinking maybe he meant we should hope that this happens because it will end this ridiculous charade.
But I am not certain it would end it, and besides the author does not make it clear, one way or the other, if this is why he thinks we ought to hope for cooling, if we are “right minded”.
The entire concept of being right or wrong minded, as decided by someone who does the deciding for everyone, is an offensive notion to begin with.
Certainly warmer is better.
Convincing people that warming is bad has to be considered the most incredible part of the entire load of nonsense that is CAGW.
Having said that, I think it is likely than a few decades of mild and sustained cooling may be the best thing that can happen at this point.
Something like what happened from ~ 1950 to 1980.
But with warmistas controlling what people hear and are taught, and also being free to alter the data in any way they choose, they may be able to conceal or sweep it under the rug no matter what happens. Or morph their BS to accommodate cooling.
After all, 20 years ago they were more than willing to concede that 10 years with no warming would disprove their hypothesis, and were willing to do so because they said it was impossible.
All they had to do was move to goalposts, lie and bullshit everyone, ramp up the alarmist and pretend they ever said what they said, and alter some records.
It is hard to understand how they got away with any of these things…but they did.
And at this point, rather than being cast aside after being falsified, their meme is going stronger than ever, and the BS is alive and well and living in every school child’s head.
Not to mention a large number of adult simpletons and credulous dopes.

Leif, I’m with you. I see no evidence to support a link between rising temps and the sun spot cycle, or any other solar influence. That doesn’t mean I think we are doomed if we don’t abandon fossil fuels in the coming decades.

I always appreciate your prompt and scientifically insightful rebuttals to the plethora of “it’s the sun stupid” posts here at WUWT. But I wonder what your over-all opinion of the whole climate change/CO2 narrative might be.

I know you have specialized in solar research but I would be very interested to hear (read) your informed views on the cause and severity of the increase in global temperatures over the last century or so and also, to hear what you think would be a proper response (if any) to address these changes.

Your articles were just has vague and unscientific as what you present here. I do not recall you doing a single calculated correlation coeff there either. You vague reference to “my articles” suggests that you can’t recall one either, so prefer no to link anything at all. Just “my articles”.

the presence of the sun is blinding obvious. However, the variability in solar activity seems much smaller than a bunch of things that get in the way once its energy arrives at the top of the atmosphere.

Nice summary. You ended with a quote from Arrhenius. You should mention that for Arrhenius “better climates” mean global warming. I would end with a quote from IPCC: “The long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Climate scientists should learn chaos theory and find the strange attractors of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations applied to climate system. It will not give accurate predictions. It will only constrain the possible states.

I’m not sure who is claiming what in the article, but there number of inaccuracies.
We don’t know yet are we entering a grand minimum.
200 years cycle is also questionable, 1800-1700 = 100, 1900s dip in solar activity is not normally known as grand minimum, but even it was it would belong to 100 year not to the 200 year periodicity, since in the early 1600s solar activity was high.
Promoting solar activity as the cause of natural variability is fine, as long as it is based on well established facts. Articles with inaccuracies do more damage than good to the AGW climate scepticism.

Seems to me that no one knows what’s happened, or will happen. There is a lot of wishful thinking, needless worry about sea ice, blips up or down in the utterly meaningless “global temperature”, and countless other chimeras on both sides.

This entire discussion comes under the heading of “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. We have already passed the high temperature peak for this interglacial; it is all downhill from here. The future danger is not heat, it is cold. The ice will return, and it may be sooner than we think. The only hope our civilization has for surviving is to increase our energy resources and general technology.

That low and cold front now moving into Alaska was even more impressive looking about 24-36 hours ago.
It appears to have become occluded and may not send another low down from the Gulf of Alaska to the West Coast.
But the first one has not even come ashore yet, and there is another one approaching very fast right behind it.
Remains to be see if the moisture flow from the tropics will reestablish into this second low…it appears to have been shunted or rotated off to the East at this point.
Look at what is expected to come together and be directed across Mexico and into the US in a few days:https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/02/07/0600Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=total_precipitable_water/orthographic=-122.83,-4.19,301

There are some tremendously huge moisture feeds coming all the way from near Papua New Guinea to the West Coast of North America, and at some levels of the atmosphere are nearly continuous.
I think we may yet see a huge atmospheric river set up that brings some truly epic rains to the Western US.
Possibly not, because it is easy for the various cells and winds flows to get out of sync, easier than for them all to line up enough to make such a river of moisture.
Here, esp. between about 600 and 800 mb levels:https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/700hPa/overlay=total_cloud_water/orthographic=-170.47,11.16,301

Soon would seem to be far more correct than the consensus about what drives the climate, but more importantly, the IPCC couldn’t be more wrong about what drives the climate if they tried, although it sure seems like they are trying very hard to be wrong …

u.k.(us)
You said, “Haven’t heard much from the NRA lately, …” I think that it is having some financial difficulties. Besides paying the leadership too much, I don’t think that it has spent its money wisely on other projects.

You said, “Haven’t heard much from the NRA lately, …” I think that it is having some financial difficulties. Besides paying the leadership too much, I don’t think that it has spent its money wisely on other projects.

Well, adopting treasonous convicted criminal Ollie North as pres. was a great idea. He sure knows how to get his hands on some arms when he needs them. Just don’t count on him keeping any oaths he may need to make from time to time.

Speaking for myself, I hope we get some cooling as it could be the remedy for damping the hot social fires of today.There are far too many people who sit on the edge of hysteria, and a large portion who could readily move that way. That is never healthy.

It won’t matter. It will get too cold, and humans will be blamed for that, at the same time it gets hot. There is nothing that can’t be blamed on humans, rightly or wrongly. We see it time and time again.

Regarding “over 80% of it is still fossil fuels, with nuclear and other non-renewables providing another 10%.”: What non-renewables are being used to produce any significant amount of energy other than fossil fuels and nuclear?

The sad thing is that there are loud and/or influential voices out there who cheer for weather-related disasters and hope that the notion of damaging or even catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is as advertised because of the time, ego, politics, career, etc, that they have invested in it. For way too many people, it is their “life.”

Of course I agree with this post but the stated goal of the Green New Deal is to have a never ending supply of cash normally devoted to energy be diverted to the Left via “renewables”. As the cost of energy skyrockets, legacy energy suppliers will pay into a fund to be dispersed to the aggrieved pocketbooks. We need a resistance ala the Yellow Vests, and soon. Like Spring.

Model hindcasts 97.5% accuracy back 800 & 3,000 years?
Not at all:
arXiv:1710.05203 doi 10.1016/j.jastp.2017.09.018
Comment on the paper by Popova et al. “On a role of quadruple component of magnetic field in defining solar activity in grand cycles”
Authors: Ilya G. Usoskin
Abstract: The paper by Popova et al. presents an oversimplified mathematical model of solar activity with a claim of predicting/postdicting it for several millennia ahead/backwards. The work contains several flaws devaluating the results: (1) the method is unreliable from the point of view of signal processing (it is impossible to make harmonic predictions for thousands of years based on only 35 years of data) and lacks quality control, (2) the result of post-diction apparently contradicts the observational data. (3) theoretical speculations make little sense, To summarize, a multi-harmonic mathematical model, hardly related to full solar dynamo theory, is presented, which is not applicable to realistic solar conditions because of the significant chaotic/stochastic intrinsic component and strong non-stationarity of solar activity. The obtained result is apparently inconsistent with the data in the past and thus cannot be trusted for the future predictions.

Global cooling represents a much bigger threat to human life than does global warming. I would not call cooling good news. A return to ice age conditions is likely inevitable at some point, but I would not hope for it. If we can put it off somehow, that would be nice.

Don’t get all emotional. The Modern Warm Period is supposed to last a couple of centuries more. Peak conditions around 2100. Things will start getting dicey around 2300-2400, and really ugly around 2500-2600. These are millennial cycles.

Xavier your long term predictions either of solar activity or warming/cooling are on the credibility par with those of the AGWs; at least they don’t go beyond the end of the current century. Don’t devalue your often good work with a nonsense.

The millennial cycle is very evident in the early and late Holocene paleoclimate and solar proxies. There are no guarantees, but projecting a known cycle into the future has more credibility that saying that everything is going to be very different.

Millennial cycles, climate, solar or both, if they exist that is. There is enough uncertainty in data based on actual observations (solar and temperature) not to mention various proxies that often mutually disagree.

It is very easy to identify the solar grand minima that belong to the millennial cycle.
There are enough dips to choose from if one is a true believer…
The Wu et al. 9000-yr series does not agree with your claim…

I believe it was a recent PBS program with David Attenborough that the claim was made that with only 3% of the surface of Earth, 50% of all species were to be found in the tropics. It certainly seems that warmth is better for most life than cold is.

The prediction for SC24 and SC25 plus the turning point in AMO will replay the global temps of the 1900-20 period. Unfortunately, this will become more obvious only after the Grand Climate Policy Fraud has been locked in for the opposite outcome. Only the best sovereign cheaters will win.

And the Synod of the Church of England is ‘disinvesting’ in fossil fuels. Virtue signaling except that if what they wish for comes true, many will die including those passionate Christians in the third world.

Facts are one thing, fervent belief is another. And more often than not perception rules reality.

For example, a young person brought up on a relentless diet of “climate change,” “renewable energy-as-panacea,” and the certainty that “fossil fuels are dying” isn’t going to be impressed by being told everything he knows is wrong (and anyone saying this is obviously in the pay of Big Oil).

The Big Lie through the ages has ultimately failed as a basis for manipulating society, but not before years and even decades of profound damage (Marxism, fascism, the “egalitarian” principles of the French Revolution for example).

I fear we are on the cusp of such an era in western society, and I think it may take a very long time before the effects are overcome.

WUWT, or a couple of posters who happen to post at WUWT? Are you suggesting that a couple of posters represent all the people at WUWT? I think you are. I think you are wrong. Posters represent themselves, not WUWT.

‘Dr. Jeffrey Foss is a philosopher of science, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and author of Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature.’

‘Finally, solar science says we should expect steady but manageable global cooling until about mid-century, when solar activity will recover and temperatures begin to warm once again. Once again, this will be due to solar activity, and not to fossil fuels or carbon dioxide emissions.’
No, solar science doesn’t say that, basically since they don’t know.

I would suggest good old prof when writing about technical aspects of solar activity to double check the facts and leave political views out of it, else he grossly devalues his contribution to the debate, it that was his aim, if it wasn’t than he is doing good job of disservice to the sceptics’ case

The response of the nonlinear oscillatory system to an insignificant external disturbance has been considered as applied to the effect of solar activity on climatic processes. Based on a simplified model, it has been indicated that the response of a nonlinear oscillator to a weak disturbing impact can be substantial. The oscillator fluctuation spectrum can decrease under the action of a disturbing factor. This means that the effect of an even weak solar or cosmophysical signal to the Earths climatic system can lead to significant climate variations if this system is nonlinear. However, it will be rather difficult to identify the solarclimatic nature of these variations because a linear relation between the cause and response is absent.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134%2FS0016793210010020

In the late 1990’s when I first began an investigation of global warming concepts to determine for myself what was going on, I looked at many different claims. One simple exercise that I found to be telling, was to directly compare smoothed sunspot numbers with similarly smoothed global temperature anomalies. Unfortunately, all that work was lost when I was flooded out of my Houston home by drought-breaking hurricane Harvey. I suggest that others might perform the same exercise anew (including recent data), if there is a question whether or not the sun affects global temperatures. Mercy… Is it even possible that it is not obvious to every thinking person that the sun affects planetary temperatures?

Download your favorite time series of yearly temperature anomaly data and sunspot numbers. Convolve each time series with a 11 year gate function (apply a simple rolling average of 11 years to each data set). After that process, it’s true that adjacent samples are no longer uncorrelated, but that fact doesn’t negate the subsequent observations. Now crossplot the smoothed temperature anomaly time series against the smoothed sunspot data. You will notice that there is a definite rough linear correlation. Not perfect, of course. Other factors are not controlled for, such as ENSO, volcanic eruptions, and time lags. However, if the solar link to global temperature were to be made a casino game in Las Vegas, you could break the bank by betting that temperature would be in the high 50 percentile whenever sunspots were also in the high 50 percentile.

I’ve done all this years ago, using several variations of more physically credible convolution functions than your “gate function”. I have not been able to find any convincing, straight forward link to solar. If I had , I would be shouting about it.

If you want to bring in a boat load of other internal and external forcings you end up with a situation where you have more weighting and parameters than you know what to do with and necessarily you will be able to produce something which kinda fits. This is exactly what IPCC sources do and GCMs do. Sadly, at that point there is not the slightest hope that you have a unique and meaningful solution. It is just as likely to be “right for the wrong reason”.

Greg, certainly you could use a Gaussian, Chebyshev, Bartlett, Butterworth, Tukey, Hanning, Hamming, Kaiser, or whatever filter turns you on, as long as you apply the same filter to both time series and it is sufficient to smooth out the approximate 11 year period of the sunspot series. I kept it simple so it could be easily understood: a simple running average.

Contrary to what you have implied, I quite intentionally did NOT “bring in a boat load of other internal and external forcings” for the reasons you mentioned. And I stated as much. You must have missed that bit. The incontrovertible fact is that if you produce a crossplot of smoothed global temperature anomalies against smoothed sunspot numbers as I’ve described, a mild positive correlation will emerge. Clearly, you never did this, or you wouldn’t be arguing the issue.

Here’s a proposal: I’ll tell you if a smoothed sunspot value is in the higher or lower 50 percentile. You then randomly guess whether the corresponding smoothed temperature anomaly is in the higher or lower 50 percentile. I’ll choose the percentile assuming a perfect linear correlation. If we bet money on a large number of these tests, I’ll clean you out.

Floyd, if you start out talking about “convolve each time series with a 11 year gate function” instead of saying you did a running mean , you are certainly NOT trying to make it simple. Neither does a convolution have to be simple low pass filter. Since you chose to talk about convolution, I assumed you knew something about what that meant.

BTW a running mean will distort both time series , reducing any true correlation which may be present.

One of the things I tried was various exponential convolutions which represent the integration of the incoming radiative flux plus a simple negative feedback mechanism. This is more physically meaningful than simply frequency filtering and certainly more reasonable than Javier’s above or below an arbitrary mean.

Since insolation is a power term it needs integrating, simply averaging or filtering is not physically meaningful. However, since you need to integrate the deviation from some arbitrary “norm” , whether the long term average goes up or down simply depends upon where you decide the neutral point lies. There is not objective way to do that.

Since you are suggesting cross plotting an insolation proxy ( SSN ): a power term, against temperature: an energy term, whatever you get is physically meaningless anyway. If you understood anything about physics and/or convolution you would be using an integrating , asymmetric kernel.

Even doing that you get nothing which shows any approximation of the form of what we are told is the historic temperature record.

If the best you can get is “a mild positive correlation” you have got nothing at all in terms of explanatory variables and predictive ability. If you do the same with CO2 you probably get a slightly better “mild positive correlation”. That proves nothing and is of no value.

Actually, Greg, I am not claiming that SSN is a proxy for insolation, although others sometimes use it as such. I’m merely noting the observation that a definite, obvious correlation exists between properly smoothed sunspot numbers and identically smoothed global temperature anomalies. Since you disagree, you evidently have never done the work, or you over-complicated the problem to the point that you destroyed the correlation that actually exists, perhaps as a result of your prejudices.

I truly wish I still had the results to show you, and Harvey hadn’t “eaten my homework”. But I don’t intend to replicate it just for you at this point in my life. I do seem to remember the correlation was positive with an R squared of about 0.6. Not particularly good, to be sure. However, these results were remarkable, considering that no other factors or forcings were controlled for (as I mentioned previously). And it was good enough to guarantee success if used in a game of chance as I have described previously. When the smoothed time series are depopulated to ensure that adjacent samples are uncorrelated and independent, the same positive correlation is observed. This nullifies much of your complaint that, “…a running mean will distort both time series , reducing any true correlation which may be present”. And I apologise for complicating the matter by using the term “convolution”. The majority of my work around 45 years ago was heavily involved with concepts being developed during the early days of digital signal processing and multidimensional signal analyses, which I specialized in at the time.

If you were to step outside your prejudices and attempt to replicate the work I have exactly described, perhaps your eyes would be opened in your attempt to prove me wrong. After all, I’m a scientist (geophysicist), and would welcome someone trying to falsify my reported results. On the other hand, you can continue to rant and wave your arms, denying the correlation that actually exists, without doing the work to try and disprove it. But that’s what I would expect from a warmist. Whatever blows your skirt up.

By the way, OF COURSE I ran through the same process with atmospheric CO2 data, although it was obviously unnecessary, and the result could be determined from inspection. At the time, I tried to avoid any preconceived notions of what was causing the observed warming, so I looked at possible correlation with a number of different factors, and different filters/filter lengths. Only the SSN data exhibited an clear correlation. When I replicated the analysis, smoothing atmospheric CO2 data with the same 11 year running mean and crossplot it against identically smoothed temperature anomaly, naturally the result was a scatter plot that looked much like the smoothed temperature anomaly series. I only did this for completeness. The result was obviously predictable, given the linearity of the CO2 record.

My work was done in 1996-1997, before many of the recent “adjustments” (i.e., distortions) were applied. But given the long term averaging that I used (11 year smoothing operator), the “adjustments” probably would not significantly affect the results anyway. More importantly, the data that I used did not include any of the El Nino’s of the last 20 years, so the correlation may not be as good today with more recent data.

That is the intent.
A global pan-genocide under the false god of climate run by Socialism.
If the world were to actually do what the Climate Alarmists say we must do, which is to be completely fossil fuel free, zero emissions after 2050, then billions would die as a necessary result of the resulting loss of food production and inability to transport what little remained to places where the starvation was greatest.
China and India certainly have signaled their intentions to not let this happen.

Regional environmental and ecosystem catastrophes would necessarily follow the collapse of modern agriculture and transportation of grains that feeds the world. African ecosystems of large mammals would disappear under the onslaught of poaching to feed starving masses as national controls collapsed. The jungles and Savannah would be cleared for fuel and subsistence farmland. More diseases such as Ebola would be rampant as the zoonotic viruses are unleashed.

The simple fact is the UN Agenda 21 adherents and the global billionaire elitists behind it are intent on realizing this apocalypse.

Be careful what you wish for. The climate apocalypse only exists in faulty climate models and so does global warming. There exists no manmade global warming. Therefore we are completely in the hands of the elements. A substantial cooling era would be disasterous for mankind.

The next decade or two will reveal whether Earth warms or cools.
Surely all right-minded people must hope that it cools
=============
WHY???

Humans are adapted to hot weather. The sort of weather found in tropical jungles. We are covered with sweat glands, not fur. This is a hot weather adaptation. We cannot survive cold weather except with technology. Most of the planet will quickly kill unprotected humans.

It is absolutely certain that the domestication of fire was the single most important event in human history. It allowed humans to move out of the jungles to populate most of the earth. And it is equally certain that removing human access to fire is the most certain way to control the human population.

The current hysteria over fossil fuels is simply population control and eugenics in disguise. The wealthy of the planet fear the poor. Obama himself said it in South Africa. The planet will boil over if Africans get access to the same lifestyle as North Americans and Europeans.

The fear of global warming is a mass hysteria, similar to many other mass hysterias documented in human history. Unfortunately history shows that this is almost certain to end poorly.

Agreed, but to stop that UN/Globalist/Scientist Mass Hysteria it is going to take something as powerful as some serious cooling.
There is no other way to stop it with the whole of the MSM pushing Project Fear every day of the year.

The only reason to hope for a cooling is to put a stake through the heart of the CAGW rubbish. Otherwise, global warming is both desirable and beneficial. Even the alarmists must admit that the hypothesis of global warming holds that the major warming will occur at in the Arctic and Antarctic with the tropics resistant to temperature rise. The Stephan – Boltzman equation shows the radically steepening resistance of the earth’s climate to warming and the shear unlikelihood of the preposterous “tipping point” to a warmer climate regime.
After record lows over the last few days, I concur with the latest Trump tweet and say, bring on the warming!

The only reason to hope for a cooling is to put a stake through the heart of the CAGW rubbish.
=================
It will not work. Cooling will be seen as proof of Climate Change. If anything it will simply reinforce the fears driving the madness of the crowd.

Fear and Greed. These are the drivers. Fear of Climate Change. Greed in the wealth and prestige to be made in promoting Fear.

This is no different than thousands of years ago. The high priests talked to the gods and thus controlled the weather. The people lived and died depending upon the success of the priests in creating a successful harvest. For this the people were required to sacrifice to the priests.

IPCC, UN, politicians, Mann, Gore, Dicaprio, the Pope, the Press, renewables industry; they are priests in this new religion. Preaching fear of Climate Change and the path to salvation. Each in turn gaining power, prestige, wealth.

The people are expected to sacrifice their fossil fuels and lifestyles to appease the gods of nature. The people are promised a successful harvest of Wind and Solar renewables as their salvation. Should salvation not arrive, it will because the people did not sacrifice enough.

Eventually the priests will be overthrown as the civilization begins to collapse and the old temples are torn down. We are seeing signs of this already. Trump the US, Ford in Ontario, yellow vests in France. However, one should not expect the priests to go quietly. The priests will cry or for blood, for the usurpers to be brought down and sacrificed, lest the gods be angered and the people suffer.

The priests will cry out for blood, for the usurpers to be brought down and sacrificed, lest the gods be angered and the people suffer.
===========
Mueller is the obvious example. The priests are crying out loudly that the people will suffer unless Evil is sacrificed, and Mueller has been tasked with smelling out the evil.

The more people change, the more civilization advances, the harder it is for people to see that we have not changed in thousands of years.

Looks like mister “philosopher”of science is seeing the writing on the wall. Better start back peddling and find some kind of new shtick to keep the grant money flowing until he get that nice academic retirement package.

Trillions spent on nothing while billions of people are still struggling to find something other than misery in their lives to no fault of their own. I’m discussed by the whole thing and all the pagan high priests involved.

I hope the world stays at least as warm as it is for the next twenty years. I’m in the camp that believes all life, including Man, thrives when temperatures are warmer than they have been. After that, I don’t care what happens. I would say the world could go to hades, but I don’t want it following me.

I came to appreciate reliable energy when the temperature dropped to -27 F and our power went out for nine hours. Not knowing how long it would be before the power came back, we relied on wood in the fireplace and boiling pots of water on our gas stove to keep from truly freezing. It only dropped to 58 degrees in the house, but my 76-year-old body did not respond well. All I could think about was, “what if this continued for a week, a month, a year”. Cold is terrifying.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Don Perry
Yes, the fact that as humans evolved we lost body hair and developed efficient sweating is strong evidence that we evolved in a climate warmer than what most experience in the mid-latitudes. However, there is a limit to how much clothing one can take off, while there is no limit to how much you can put on. Fortunately, we also have advanced brains.

They guy is a dangerous lunatic. Cold is much worse than warm.
The only reason to hope for some cold is so that the warmists are shown to be the anti-scientific morons they are.
If lunatics like this get away with it the hoax will go on forever.

You have no graph of CO2 to sunspot directly, just Powerpoint overlays, squinting and babbling. A direct graph of the past 150 years of CO2 versus sun spot count shows no correlation whatsoever. With lower sunspot count the global mean temperature anomaly is just more variable, so the relationship graphs as a pyramid, perhaps induced by it being less likely to have high sunspot counts. So the correlation is a blob. Give me an email address and I will email the spreadsheet and public data it contains and you can try to refute it. At this point, you are promoting cliche climatology.

All this debate misses a rather huge elephant in the room. What arrogance to effectively dismiss human progress. Do we really think that in even 50 years coal, oil and gas will be the mainstay of energy production whether or not rising CO2 has a major impact on climate. Think back 50 years – no personal computers, no laser diodes, no DVD’s TV sets were based on CRT’s, no mobile phones, no digital cameras. I could go on almost ad infinitum. Don’t start me on the advances in medicine! Sure energy was based on fossil fuels then as it is now but there was no strong imperative to look for alternatives, coal and oil were cheap and plentiful and there were more exciting areas to explore.

So is this a speculative argument? Not at all, we already have a scientifically proven alternative for base load power – thorium reactors. Prototypes have been built and work. It’s still a significant engineering task to build commercial large scale reactors but significant engineering tasks are tackled every day. The risk is low. Remember, thorium reactors can’t melt down like uranium reactors, there is less radioactive waste and what is produced is dangerous for a far shorter time. The fuel is far more plentiful than is the case for uranium. The only barrier is public fear and political timidness.

Beyond that there is hot fusion, still a risky scientific endeavour but one that is certain to be solved eventually. Another alternative is cold fusion – widely ridiculed and possibly even riskier than hot fusion but the more recent reports show so many confirmations that it is becoming almost impossible to ignore. Not to mention, other energy sources not conceived of as yet. There is a reason science fiction so often comes true – its because once humans conceive and can articulate an idea a research focus follows and sooner or later we always find a way to make it happen.

Bottom line, CO2 is a green house gas, green house gases do cause warming, the direct impact of doubling CO2 is around 1C of warming. This is all VERY well established INCONTROVERTIBLE science. Those who feel inclined to disbelieve need to read up some basic spectroscopy. The BIG question is, are climate feedbacks positive or negative. If positive then maybe 3C per doubling is possible (maybe just) , but if negative its more likely to be closer to 0.3C which is trivial. Everything I know about stable real world systems and the combined role of water vapour and clouds convinces me that the feedbacks are strongly negative which is why I am sceptical of AGW. BUT IN THE END – SO WHAT!!!!

If the greens were rational and serious about looking after the environment, they would not be pushing windmills and solar panels despoiling our landscape and damaging our society. They would be pushing for the funding to go towards immediate commercialisation of thorium power plus strong increase in funding for alternative baseload energy technologies. Whether AGW was right or wrong, such a focus would advance human society and help reduce poverty. That they don’t tells me one of two things. Either they are completely ignorant and scientifically naive in which case their opinions should be ignored, or their true motivation has nothing to do with protecting the environment and human wellbeing. In that case, AGW is simply a convenient tool to support their real agenda, a case of the ends justifying the means – at least in their eyes. The second is a far more sinister, at least there is a solution to ignorance, its called education.

I would just add that there’s a baby elephant in the room with respect to this particular discussion. Energy from the Sun is fairly constant in total (TSI), but varies significantly in components (UV, Vis, IR). The components act on the climate in very different ways, therefore, these variations have the potential to cause variations in climate. The TSI causes global warming argument is a straw man of the Sun’s variations significantly contributing to climate change argument in my opinion.

“If we don’t use coal, oil and natural gas for energy, many of the 7 billion of us now alive must die. Those who survive will be impoverished and enslaved, toiling and scavenging for food by day, and fearing the darkness by night – except for the privileged few who still have money, energy and power.”

A pro -CAGW article . Yes its real but the dim sun buys some more time. Seems it belongs elsewhere

The next glacial period will cause billions to perish from famine. Our climate history over the last 600K periods show cycles of around 100K glacial followed by 15-20K interglacial periods. We are near the end of the current interglacial if history is a measure unless mans CO2 is helping delay the next glacial period (uncertain)

Meanwhile tens of thousands satellites plan to be launched to support 5G introducing carbon black to the stratosphere which could accelerate tropospheric cooling and push us closer to a glacial period. Nary a concern from the climate alarmists

The numerical sources for these graphs show that the warming trend had been contributed to by increasing water vapor trend and the warming stopped when the water vapor trend stopped increasing. Nearly all of the increased water vapor (about 7% since 1960) resulted from increased irrigation. Irrigation is limited. Water vapor is self-limiting. The higher WV is a likely factor in the current high precipitation.

The increasing CO2 is ignored which demonstrates that burning fossil fuels has little if any effect on climate.

I don’t reject the current science of climate. I only reject the stupid bits.

As well as my many other qualifications, I have a psychology degree.

I have even co-authored a paper with Dunning and Kruger. They are pretty pissed off with the way that Alarmists claim that anybody who disagrees with them, suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

We came up with a new name, the Dummy-Booger effect, to describe people who claim that others suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, while being totally unaware that they are suffering from it themselves.

The Dummy part is easy to understand. The Booger part refers to how Alarmists are like people who pick their nose in public, and then flick the boogers (dried nasal mucus), at other people.

Just read through all of the comments, I was somewhat surprised that many people including a solar scientist do not believe that the suns variability does not cause our global temperature to vary.
I ask all as the sun is our only heater.what else could it be?. It would seem to me that the suns behaviour varies many things on all the planets in our solar system.

The suns magnetic field controls our magnetic field which is behaving rather badly at the moment, causing concern with the amount of radiation getting through,a big worry for airline pilots.
The correlation between a quiet sun, the heating of the earths core and an increase in volcanic activity is also a concern, as many huge extinct volcanoes are stirring. If a big one goes bang it could not only kill a lot of people, but also give us some serious climate change.

Planetary cycles and our and our relationship to the rest of our galaxy cause other small changes, but the sun remains our only heater, turn it off for one day it would not be nice. Cheers

The option to do nothing is appropriate because the only thing being considered (curtailing the use of fossil fuels) will have no effect on climate and besides that, the warming trend essentially ended around 2002-2005.

The current (since about 2002-2005) apparent plateau/eventual downtrend and two previous 30+ year downtrends in temperature with relentlessly rising CO2, demonstrate that CO2 has little if any effect on average global temperature.

It is disturbing that so many (but not all) climate experts got it wrong. I wonder how much wider the separation between the rising CO2 and not rising temperature will need to get to open their eyes. The lack of influence of CO2 on average global temperature is demonstrated graphically at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxjCZUoU0AAf06-.jpg
This graph shows that there has been little or no sustained change in average global temperature since about 2002. Data from Law Dome (Antarctica) and Mauna Loa show that CO2 has increased since 2002 by 40% of the increase 1800 to 2002

The historical temperature record is indeed shaky in detail, but probably not that bad in general – that is, before all the fraudulent temperature “adjustments” in recent years. There are a few long surface-temperature records, such as the Central England Temperatures (CET). Then there are some good longer-term proxies (but not tree rings).

We also have historical record, for example the grapes grown in Britain in Roman times and the Norse settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period. There were the ice fairs on the Thames, and the huge death toll from starvation and exposure during the Little Ice Age, and the torture and burning of thousands of witches for alleged weather sorcery (which did not provide much heat and did not solve the cold crisis).

In general, past warm periods coincided with higher solar activity, and colder periods coincided with low solar activity and few or no sunspots. Based on that general correlation, and the current crash in solar activity, Earth will probably cool moderately, starting anytime soon.

Regarding predictions, I wrote in an article published 1Sept2002 in the Calgary Herald:

“If [as we believe] solar activity is the main driver of surface temperature rather than CO2, we should begin the next cooling period by 2020 to 2030.”

I will stand with this prediction – for moderate, natural cooling, similar to that which occurred from ~1940 to the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1977, despite increasing atmospheric CO2. As stated previously, I hope to be wrong, because humanity and the environment suffer during cold periods.

Abstract
Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8°C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the secular Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove ‘skillful’ as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct, as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event.

I cannot accept the stated premise :”At the very least, humankind has an historic opportunity to witness a crucial test between two scientific hypotheses of enormous consequence. The next decade or two will reveal whether Earth warms or cools.”

A decade or two means next to nothing climatically. Not to mention the fact that we are drawn into a debate where any warming is accepted as 1) generically catastrophic and 2) caused by mankind.

I became interested in the climate change issue some time ago. Early on I read many articles from this site. Like many of you, I simply wanted an answer to the question is it natural or is it CO2. To me, this is compelling and does answer the question. Below is the figure for Law Dome and it is flat until 1800. Temperature variation can’t be due to CO2 prior to 1800.

The significant point is that most of the world renewables investment money goes into wind and solar, but these two sources don’t even figure heavily in delivered renewable energy, let alone overall energy.

If we continue this way, we might, if lucky, be 100% reliant on renewables by the year 3000.

“The premature switch to renewable energy recommended by the false prophets of Climate Apocalypse is really just one step in an industrial counter-revolution devoutly desired by those discontented with modern life in free market democracies – and ready to erase our hard-won prosperity and freedom.”

What makes discussion difficult is that the vast majority of people who want the government to build windmills to fight global warming is that they have sincere beliefs, supported by their shallow understanding a their deep level of trust in their ideological leadership.

Promotors of reusable energy make the mistake (intentional or not) of not accounting for all of the energy consumed. Instead they typically account for only energy directly used to make and install the components. They don’t account for the energy directly and indirectly consumed by the builders, administrators, maintenance workers, and support personnel to maintain their lifestyle. What part of the energy consumed by the clerk at the grocery store used by each employee should be included, etc.? Essentially everything has an energy cost. The earth does not charge.

Accounting for ALL of the energy involved is essentially impossible, certainly impractical. Instead, the energy cost is easily and accurately accounted for by a proxy which is the dollar cost. Dollar cost is readily available. Example for a 5 mW installation:
Installed cost @ $1.61E6/mW = $8.05E6
Operation & maintenance for 20 years @ $210,000/yr = $4.2E6
Total cost = $12.2E6

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